Read the previous post by Jesse De Angelis
When I was little, I would hold books from my father’s bookshelf in my lap, and pretend I knew how to read.
Over time, I remember the words on the pages slowly becoming comprehensible, as if they were out of focus before, and then became clear. It was a remarkable thing. I felt as if a secret code was being revealed to me.
I also spent a lot of time in my parent’s lab, and performed the same ritual with their scientific papers. But even after I learned to read, the paper’s contents remained a mystery. They were filled with garbled letters and words that I looked up in the dictionary, but still made no sense (Kinase? Polymerase?).
Both my parents are scientists. Sometimes my dad would bring home liquid nitrogen from the lab and we would freeze and shatter my mom’s roses from the backyard. If I got sick, I got a lesson in viruses and bacteria that usually involved cartoon drawings.
I never related those fun experiments and lessons with the papers I tried to read. When I got into high school, and then college, I abandoned science as a pursuit because that type of writing had taught me that I wasn’t smart enough for science.
Now that I’m pursuing a career in science journalism, I hear a lot about this idea of using elements of fiction to tell science stories. But there’s something about that concept that doesn’t sit right with me.
I distrust the fiction/nonfiction writing dichotomy the same way I have grown to distrust the science/non-science dichotomy. It implies that there are two worlds, so different, that the very way you talk about them must change.
When I think back to the way my parents taught science to me, not through their papers, but through play and fun, I now realize what they were doing. They weren’t utilizing “fiction tools,” though sometimes there was storytelling involved.
They were practicing another type of literary art: translation. I know why I learned to read my father’s books, but not his scientific papers. They were in a different language. I went to school and learned the English language, but not the language of advanced science. My parents went through almost ten years of post-graduate education to learn the language being used in those papers. For the rest of us, it only makes sense that we can’t immediately understand them.
You cannot walk into a foreign land and be surprised when you can’t speak. A real life example: my mother is Chinese, and when we go to China, she spends the first couple days staggering between Mandarin and English. It’s difficult for her to switch between the two, and she ends up speaking half of each.
The same happens when some scientists try to communicate, I think. Our job as science writers is not to turn science into a fiction story, but merely to be an effective translator.
Here’s an example in a text conversation I recently had with my mom. I was trying to understand an acronym in a paper I was reading, called JNK. I asked her what is was and this is what she said:
Totally incomprehensible. I responded, asking her to try to explain it to me again. This time, she did a lot better.
My mom’s second explanation works because she translated well, not because she used a fictional character, or a metaphor.
I do think metaphor can be helpful. I do think imagery is helpful (and often beautiful). But I hesitate to say that the key to good science writing is to bring fiction elements into it. I believe that a science story translated in a clear and simple way can be also be powerful. The mouse in this experiment stayed thin on a high fat diet—that’s amazing! Science doesn’t need to get a makeover into fiction to become interesting or relevant.
I agree that if you translate a science story well, it may end up having a lot of similarities to a good work of fiction. But this is not because the science story was made to sound like fiction. It’s because deep within a science story are all of the elements you need to tell a breathtaking tale.
Science is human. It is the study of the body and the mechanisms of the body. Along with that comes a person, who lives in relation to that body. Also inherent in that is the concept of identity, culture, mortality, fear, and wonder. These things are powerful.
Scientists are normal people doing monumental things. They are going to space, they are cutting open your heart, they are analyzing the tiniest molecules imaginable in the universe. There needn’t be any tools or tricks necessary, these stories are so compelling that one just needs to tell them and they will sing.
Comments from other contributors to the Poetics of Science online discussion:
Karen Malpede: This is a compelling argument. Thanks.
L. Shapley Bassen: “Science doesn’t need to get a makeover into fiction to become interesting or relevant.” I thoroughly agree and appreciated “translation” as an apt metaphor and/or accurate description of science writing. Before it ceased publication [alas], the magazine The Sciences was the best in the field. Its editors were expert at presenting science writing WITH artwork that informed and illustrated, introducing the work of many otherwise unfamiliar artists. I’ve had subscriptions for decades as well to Scientific American and Discover magazine. Sci American became much more user-friendly a decade or so ago, and likewise, Discover magazine beefed up its science content/delivery. Just this month there’s a super article about Catal Huyuk that describes an advanced method of archeological dating. Repeating what I wrote in my own response re: current fiction writing, I think that w/o some inclusion of science as current context, we’re reading/writing historical fiction . . . which is a fine genre I enjoy . . . but it’s NOT the story of Our Town anymore.
Joshua Roebke: This is really wonderful, Shayla. But I am somewhat biased because your ideas are, in part, so similar to mine. I too was first drawn to science by the stories that my father told, especially when he tucked me in at night as a child. And my dad was always demonstrating an idea or a concept to me using playful experiments. In fact, he encouraged my curiosity and tinkering. But my father was not a scientist; he was a farmer who had taught himself enough math and science to become an electrician. I never heard the rarefied language of the hard sciences before I began to learn it myself, in college. For me, science remained interesting stories and ceaseless tinkering throughout my teenage years. I was not discouraged by my ignorance of its language until I was doing my PhD. By that time, I had learned to speak its dialect well enough to be able to translate it on my own. Still, it was the human story of science that I missed most, and that I most wanted to share with others, when I became a writer. I had realized, as you did, that if I translated the science as best as I could, and told the story behind the science truthfully, that it read almost as well as any fiction or creative prose. So that is what I do now. I translate the lives of scientists and their ideas into stories. In practice, my task is made a little more difficult because I am writing about theoretical physics, who communicate in math rather than words, but it just adds another layer to the translation. And it certainly does not detract from the humanity behind the stories that I want to tell.
Helen Betya Rubinstein: I too found this post, and its argument about science writing as translation, compelling and convincing. It made me think about how all writing (and reading) is an act of translation. And then it made me wonder about the relationship between genre and translation.
Many of these posts have me thinking about genre. In the same way that to call something a “poem” is to instruct the reader in how to read it—creating expectations, both constructive and destructive, and causing some readers to simply shut their eyes (“I don’t get poetry”)—so, too, to call something “science” is to introduce a set of expectations and to cause some readers to shut their eyes (“I don’t do science,” “This will be boring,” or “This is unquestionable. This is fact”).
But we know that genre, like gender, is a construct. And as you point out, the divisions between fiction/nonfiction and science/non-science are imagined. Fiction isn’t a separate ingredient to be stirred in to science stew. Science is actually story-driven; that is part of its humanness.
To think of science writing as translation is useful, I suppose, because it brings our attention to real differences in communication (as your wonderful text examples demonstrate), rather than differences in genre conventions. When you write that your father’s scientific papers were “in a different language,” though, I read this as metaphor. Am I wrong to do so? What are the overlaps between language and genre?
Sara Talpos: I’m a bit late to this discussion, but YES to this statement from Shayla’s original post:
“I believe that a science story translated in a clear and simple way can be also be powerful. The mouse in this experiment stayed thin on a high fat diet—that’s amazing! Science doesn’t need to get a makeover into fiction to become interesting or relevant.”
At the same time, the idea of science writing as “translation” feels limiting to me because translation involves a certain (if imperfect) fidelity to an original text or idea. Much of my favorite science writing does incorporate this kind of description/translation, but it also does more. For example, Tracy K. Smith’s poem “Life on Mars” begins with speculation about dark matter then makes associative leaps to family relationships and to physical abuse. The poem’s ultimate goal, I believe, is not to translate the concept of dark matter for lay readers, but rather, to explore the different ways in which we humans are connected to one another. Poets like Quan Barry and Linda Gregerson, I believe, use science similarly—as a starting point, a counter-argument, or a kind of foil—in their writing.
Joshua Roebke: Sara, this is great. You made me wonder about the limits of translation again. But you also made me consider, even more, what we mean by “science writing.” To me, it once only meant writing that communicates science. The first group of professionals who called themselves science writers were largely journalists after all. That is why I wrote that good science writing is translation in my own contribution. And I worry primarily about fidelity when I communicate science myself. But since I started reading more science in literary fiction and poetry, I’ve allowed my definition to expand. I suspect that most other readers and writers have not. They think of science writing, largely, as journalism or non-fiction. The National Association of Science Writers is still comprised largely of journalists and non-fiction writers.
This past spring, in a course that I taught called The Literature of Science, I planned to assign a few poems by Tracy K. Smith. “Life on Mars” is magisterial, and Smith uses science playfully and creatively in her poems. But as I read them, too few made me think about science so I did not assign them in my class. The goal of the course was to think about what science is and what scientists do, largely through fiction and poetry, but Smith was not trying to do that in her writing (as even you write, she is not trying to explain dark matter). Science was the springboard from which she made greater leaps. So I hesitated even to call her poetry science writing. This may be the persistence of my bias, but there were examples of poetry that did make me worry about what science is and does. So I assigned that. In particular, the work of Rebecca Elson, a poet and astronomer who died tragically young, made me worry about what science is again. She helped me experience the invisibility of dark matter when she wrote: “Above a pond / An unseen filament / Of spider’s floss / Suspends a slowly / Spinning leaf.”
So I’m wondering, rather than the limits of translation, do we instead need to worry about how we delimit science writing?